Hortonworks IPO: 9 Days and Counting

Less than a month after Hortonworks unveiled the news that it confidentially filed its S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, it has set its expected IPO date for Dec. 12, according to Nasdaq. The offer amount is $96.6 million, with prices for individual shares set at $12 to $14. A total of six million shares will be made available.

Hortonworks is the first independent, commercial Hadoop provider to go public. Some believe that its IPO will be a bellwether for the $50.2 billion data-related segments (data management and data storage) of the enterprise software market.

Growing Fast

In a non-related conversation, Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, a Hortonworks competitor, said this market is experiencing a 58 percent compound annual growth rate, citing Allied Market Research as the source. He added that 451 Research has published similar growth rates.

John Schroeder, CEO of MapR, the remaining independent commercial Hadoop distro provider, told CMSWIre at the time of the S-1 unveiling, that the Hortonworks filing spoke well of the Hadoop market overall. “It’s proof positive that the market is maturing and good for investment,” he said.

Tony Baer, an analyst at Ovum, said the IPO will show how the market views Hortonworks’ business model. He noted that as a 100 percent open source provider, the burden of proof is on Hortonworks.

That being said, if Hortonworks can combine the open source components of its Hadoop distro in a way that 1 plus 1 equals 3, it will, no doubt, be offering something of value. And because no Hadoop distro provider is an unrivaled market leader yet, Hortonworks may have the time and already has the right manpower to make that happen.

This is a breaking story. We’ll follow-up as more insight becomes available.